Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Birds Art Life

Subtitle: A Year of Observation

Author: Kyo Maclear

Narrator: Laurel Lefkow

Format: Unabridged

Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-13-17

Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this intimate and exuberant meditation on creativity and life - a field guide to things small and significant.

For Vladimir Nabokov, it was butterflies. For John Cage, it was mushrooms. For Sylvia Plath, it was bees. Each of these artists took time away from their work to become observers of natural phenomena. In 2012, Kyo Maclear met a local Toronto musician with an equally captivating side passion - he had recently lost his heart to birds. Curious about what prompted this young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature, Kyo decides to follow him for a year and find out.

A distilled, crystal-like companion to H Is for Hawk, this memoir celebrates the particular madness of loving and chasing after birds in a big city. Intimate and philosophical, moving with ease between the granular and the grand view, it celebrates the creative and liberating effects of keeping your eyes and ears wide open and explores what happens when you apply the core lessons of birding to other aspects of life. In one sense this is a book about disconnection - how our passions can buckle under the demands and emotions of daily life - and about reconnection: how the act of seeking passion and beauty in small ways can lead us to discover our most satisfying life. On a deeper level, it takes up the questions of how we are shaped and nurtured by our parallel passions and how we might come to cherish not only the world's pristine natural places but also the blemished urban spaces where most of us live.

Birds Art Life follows two artists on a yearlong adventure that is at once a meditation on the nature of creativity and a quest for a good and meaningful life.

Critic Reviews:

"A wondrous little book about 'being a little lost'." (The New York Times)

"An incandescent exploration of beauty, inspiration, art, family, and freedom that seems to leave no topic out of its binocular scope." (Toronto Star)

Members Reviews:

A Small Gem

This small gem of a book celebrates the oft-ignored value of the commonplace. The author uses her perceptive view of nature, in this case the avian population of urban Toronto, to comment upon more profound facets of daily life.

Her own accompanying ink drawings are whimsical complements to her thoughtful prose and are interspersed with appropriate nature photography.

Although the book flows rapidly through the year it will linger in the reader's mind and lends itself to multiple readings.

A joy to read

Birds Art Life is a charming and intriguing book. The author records her bird walks with a mentor. Their relationship gives an aura of mystery to the narrative. The author learns to listen and observe birds. Birds Art Life is also full of details from books the author has read. It made me want to also read those books. Although the book has a sad theme--the aging of her father--the narrative is life-affirming.

Life, death, and points in between, birds too

Some parts were slow going. It is written in a relatively choppy style of short paragraphs in many of the chapters. I did enjoy reading it though. A very personal set of essays combining beginning birding with associated thoughts about life and death and points in between. I like that it was divided into months and that birds were specifically identified for each month.